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Henry Lee Lucas, 64, Murderer Who Said He Killed Hundreds

Henry Lee Lucas, the convicted killer who 18 years ago confessed to hundreds of unsolved murders and then recanted, died in prison on Monday. He was 64.

The cause was apparently a heart attack, said a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Larry Fitzgerald. He said Mr. Lucas had been taken to the infirmary after complaining of chest pains.

Mr. Lucas was the only man spared from a Texas death sentence by George W. Bush during Mr. Bush's tenure as governor. He was condemned to die for the killing of an unidentified woman whose body was found in a ditch in 1979. The victim became known as Orange Socks because that was all she was wearing.

No witnesses or physical evidence linked Mr. Lucas to the crime, but he confessed to it four times. Later he said he had lied, and work records and a cashed paycheck indicated that he might have been in Florida at the time of the crime.

Mr. Bush agreed that there were questions about the conviction and commuted the sentence to life in prison just four days before Mr. Lucas was set to receive a lethal injection in 1998. During Mr. Bush's six years as governor, 152 people were executed in Texas.

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Mr. Lucas later recanted, and many of the murder cases attributed to him were never reopened. He attributed the confessions to a steady diet of tranquilizers, steaks, hamburgers and milkshakes fed to him by investigators, along with crime scene clues that he said he had parroted back to detectives.

The district attorney who prosecuted Mr. Lucas in the case that led to the death sentence, Ken Anderson, said today that he believed Mr. Lucas had killed anywhere from three people to a dozen.

''I don't think he knew exactly,'' Mr. Anderson said. ''It's difficult to imagine you can rely on anything he said, but the fact remains he was a serial killer, even though we're unable to pinpoint the exact number.''

Jim Mattox, a former attorney general of Texas, said today: ''Nobody should have any sympathy for Lucas as a result of his convictions. But I think after you've dealt with the individual, you had to give him some credit for being able to engage in the kind of hoax he engaged in.''

In 1999, Mr. Lucas became fascinated by the case of Angel Maturino Resendiz, a drifter known as the Railroad Killer who was linked to at least eight murders in Texas, Kentucky and Illinois.

''If this was 1983, I'd claim these murders, too,'' Mr. Lucas told The Houston Chronicle. ''I made the police look stupid. I was out to wreck Texas law enforcement.''

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A version of this obituary; biography appears in print on March 14, 2001, on Page B00009 of the National edition with the headline: Henry Lee Lucas, 64, Murderer Who Said He Killed Hundreds. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe